A Little Note About Account Access…
After giving you a bunch of sappy, punch you in the gut type of blogs lately, I decided it was probably about time for something a little more practical.
But first (as always) a story.
I’m working on a probate right now where the gentleman passed away rather suddenly. He was healthy, and then he was gone (yes, there’s a point in there about not waiting, but that’s for another day).
When his family started trying to piece together his financial life, they found some good things and some bad things.
The good – all password and account information had been saved and was readily available.
The bad – it was all in a word document that was over 30 pages long and was full of old, useless information.
Now the personal representative is charged with trying to figure out which passwords are good, which are bad, which are current, and which are old.
The word document with everything stored is the old way of doing things. There is just too much to keep up with, new things are being added all the time, and the Word document is not secure.
Thankfully, though, with the rise in our level of online account usage have come several solutions to organizing and storing your passwords (and making them available to your people when you are gone).
I’m not going to review them all here, I’m just going to tell you about the one I use.
What’s great about this is you can share the information you want with others (i.e. spouse, family, etc.) and you can set up an emergency access feature so if something happens to you the people that need access can get it.
In the world we live in there’s a delicate balance between security and accessibility. These types of services give you access to both.
If you aren’t already using something like this, I’d highly suggest you put it at the top of your to do list. It’s one of those things that isn’t important until it is important.
Sincerely,
Christopher Small
CMS Law Firm LLC
P.S. It wouldn’t be a good email if I didn’t suggest you set up a time to talk with me about estate planning if you haven’t already. So, if you haven’t already talked to me about estate planning and want to, click here to schedule a time for us to talk. Cheers.